Tales of a Priest » Humor Hut

See you at CYPHAN!

Avalonna — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:49:14 +0000

CYPHAN? Sounds like a venereal disease, doesn’t it? I assure you, it’s not. It’s a new Midwest Scifi/fantasy convention for costumers, collectors, gamers and fans located in the Chicago Suburbs, and it’s happening this weekend.

One of the weekend seminars is a World of Warcraft discussion, and a last minute change of plans (or desperation) has planted yours truly as one of the speakers. It’s nothing hardcore, raiding or even healing related – more of an intro to the game for new and newer players. We’ll be covering such things as choosing a faction, race, and class, leveling, gold making, guilds, dungeons, & etiquette. So if you’re in the area, and need something to do this weekend, come check out the convention! The seminar is scheduled for Saturday at 11:00 am, so come join us and share your experiences with newer players….and you can say ‘hi’ to me. I don’t bite. Hard.

Check it out here and hope to see you there! Oh, and yes – they do server liquor there. That’s the only reason I agreed to do this.

See you at CYPHAN! is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Hey Ma – I’m on PugCast!

Avalonna — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:50:42 +0000

Pugcast - A WoW Podcast

Just a quick update to let you know Episode 42 of Pugcast is available to download. I joined the show hosts Jeg & Draechen, along with fellow players Cornelious & Bryterside, for an informal roundtable chat about the upcoming raid changes for Cataclysm.

Lots of great discussion involving guild structure and challange, and a even a bit of talk about PVP changes (I took a nap at that part). I wasn’t drunk for once, so for those that look forward to me embarrassing myself – sorry. There’s always next time.

If you haven’t heard the PuGcast Podcast before, make sure you check out their episodes. They’re hilarious guys, and always let the show run wild. Of course, they cover WoW, but these two WILD N’ CRAZY GUYS will talk about anything! You can even nominate a retard you’ve had the misfortune of meeting in game for their One Star Turkey Of the Week for a public beat down. Join them in their Live Chat Room during the shows!

Thanks again, guys! Hope we can do it again soon. I promise I’ll be drunk next time!

(PS – we’re recruiting an EXCEPTIONAL Disc or holy priest (bonus if you can play both!)

Hey Ma – I’m on PugCast! is a post from: Tales of a Priest

“Do you want to play a game?”

Avalonna — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:54:17 +0000

I want to play a game.....

That stupid horse. That Retarded Horse. Everyone has it. It’s an atrocious, Sparkly, Star Horise Mount, & people waited in queues of 4+ hours to drop $25 of real world cash to get it. How absolutely idiotic.

So I bought two. One for me, and one for you. Wanna win it?

That Retarded Horse

Now I could make up some silly contest making you email us, explaining why you love Tales Of Priest, or saying your little brother Timmy has cancer, and his dying wish is to ride around on one of these fruit-cycles, but where’s the fun in lying like that? Or, seeing as it’s a WoW related item on a WoW related site, I could have WoW related questions, but it’s my damn contest and it’s my rules.

It’s no secret I love my horror movies (hell, I co author this site with a succubus) so let’s see if YOU love them too. It’s fitting, seeing as flying around on this mount would make Charles Manson crap his pants (or die laughing).

I will ask four easy horror movie questions, and on 4/24/10, I will pick one random winner from a group that answers all four correctly!

1) Freddy Krueger is the Son of a Hundred ___________ ? (fill in the blank)

2) What is the name of the main Cenobite in Hellraiser?

3) “Alright you Primitive Screwheads, listen up! You see this? This… is my____________ ” (Fill in the blank)

4) What was the name of the Android in ‘Aliens’?

See? Easy! So email me at Avalonna(at)talesofapriest.com with your answers, and maybe you too can stand around in Dalaran on this ridiculous thing! Good luck!

Now, that being said – what do YOU think about this mount, and the Blizz RMT store for pets and mounts? I’ll have a real post on that and my thoughts regarding it in the future.

“Do you want to play a game?” is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Healing Drunk & Pantsless on “/2″

Avalonna — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 11:41:26 +0000

Just a quick update to let everyone know we’ll be LIVE on the Slash 2 podcast this Friday, 4/16/10 at 7 central. I’m sure it will be lots of incoherent fun, so make sure you stop by and join us in the live chatroom. These guys are a blast, so check out their previous shows if you haven’t! Healing Drunk & Pantsless on “/2″ is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Healing Drunk & Pantsless on “/2″ is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Power Word: Fail! Podcast Now Available

Avalonna — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:57:12 +0000

The podcast you’ve all been waiting for is now available for download! Ava and Derevka had a blast recording this show— albeit a bit racy (Fingers of Frost!!!), we had some great conversation and some great topics were discussed. Thanks for the questions! Hopefully more discussion and podcasting will be in the future. You can download the podcast via iTunes or through the many options by following the link below.

Power Word: Fail! Podcast Now Available is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Derevka’s Account Hacked? And A Contest!

Avalonna — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:23:49 +0000

With account hacks/keylogs being a topic of much discussion, I wanted to recap what happened to me this past weekend…

It was a dark and stormy night… Ok it wasn’t stormy, but it was dark – I went out last night for Margaritas with some friends, and we found out one of them plays wow… we all wind up back at my place, so my friend Anthony asks if he can see my account. Sure.

I try logging in, put my authenticator password in… Invalid.

I chuckle, and try again.

Invalid.
Invalid.

I try to log into Account Management.

Invalid.

I try to log into the Blizzard Forums.

Invalid.

…. fuck.

I check the armory hoping my character is still clothed. She is. /phew

I send Avalonna a text asking her to check if my toon is online. She texts back saying she’d check and let me know.

“Nope, not online.”

I’m sitting there thinking, “I know when you change your password you get an email letting you know you changed your password.” (I did it just the other day)…. yet I have no email.

Let’s try one more time, and then I’ll call customer support tomorrow morning. Boom. I get in. Hmm… is it really unlikely that after several pitchers of margaritas that I can’t type a password…. apparently so.

Friends don’t let friends drink and try to type in passwords.

While, my story is funny – there are other stories that do not end this way. They end with naked gnomes with not a copper to their name, and guild banks plundered… both of those things are very scary!

EVERYONE SHOULD GET AN AUTHENTICATOR. Period. The end. One of the more recent tactics of compromised accounts, is that the Hacker immediately puts an authenticator on the account. What this does, is that it makes it even more difficult for you to get your account back since you can’t even log in and change the password back. Most smartphones have the ability to download the Blizzard Authenticator for free or for a nominal charge – and I urge everyone to get one.

Yes, typically you need to do something to get hacked – be that a phishing scam, going to unscrupulous sites, downloading things from non-official webpages, using powerleveling services, etc. However, it is not unheard of that people who do not do any of these still sometimes fall victim to keyloggers. You hear that excuse quite often: “Well I don’t go to weird sites and click ads or links.” or “I don’t watch Furry porn and type in my password there.” or “Those fake Beta Cataclysm emails go straight into my trash bin.” Be that as it may, you still can be hacked! These keyloggers are tricky… they don’t simply have a big banner ad that reads: “I’m loggin ur keyz!”

Blizzard recently launched their Account Security page, which does a fairly good overview about how to keep your account safe.

That being said, Tales of a Priest will be giving a Blzzard Authenticator away!! (Canada and US players only). To enter into this contest simply send an email to contests(at)talesofapriest.com with your characters name, realm, and a quick note! We’ll be picking a winner at random on Noon EST February 7th, 2010! Good luck!

Derevka’s Account Hacked? And A Contest! is a post from: Tales of a Priest

Liar, Liar – Pants on Fire

Derevka — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:09:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog explaining how you should approach applying for a raiding guild. One of the biggest things I stressed was DO NOT LIE. Don’t. Don’t even think about. It will almost always bite you in the ass. There are a million ways to verify in game accomplishments, past guilds, name changes, server transfers – all and more can be found using tools such as the armory, web sites that track changes…or something as simple as creating a character on the realm of a past guild, as was the case here.

I’m standing around in Dalaran, waiting for raid invites to go out & playing with my beloved Monkey Ball trinket when a random level 55 Death Knight named Eloras sends me a tell, asking me how I was doing and if I had a few seconds to talk about a past Raid Leader of ours. Wait, what? A past Raid Leader? Our guild has been around since before Molten Core was even in the game, and has had one raid leader: Our Giant Ball of Enthusiasm, Chewey – the Ex Tank now known as Darth DPS. And seeing as he’s tossing out tonight’s invites, he’s either REALLY good at two boxing, or something fishy is going on.

I let this person know as much, and he was genuinely amused. He informed me that his friends had an applicant on their vent at this moment for an interview, claiming to be our past raid leader, helping the guild over come such challenges as our Yogg +0, Tribute to Insanity and even recent ICC kills, and they were having some doubts to the validity of it. Well, of course I had had to know WHO this person was:

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m laughing – let me ‘splain. See, Safetyman was a warrior tank on our server. He was no one of particular interest, being a guild leader of a small, very casual guild that I can’t even remember the name of. You know the type – the kind of guild that tags whomever, and gets together to kill a few bosses here and there, but calls it a night after a wipe or two. I remember him being a nice guy from the occasional 5 man I did on my alts, but I distinctly remember him because he was one of many people that paid us 15,000 gold for a rusted proto-drake way back in August . While he didn’t do anything noteworthy during that run, we had to get him every single achievement for that meta – including his first ever basic Keepers and Yogg kill. Not a big deal – we congratulated him, got him some gear and called it a night. HOWEVER – he took this new found “experience” and applied to our guild….claiming progression work on EVERY SINGLE “hard mode” we literally just carried him though! Obviously, there were many more issues than just his lack of experience, so we gave him the standard “you’re not what we’re looking for, good luck to you” answer and sent him on his way.

So here we are, several months later, and our dear warrior is on a new server & applying to the leading guild, Nexus ofUldaman, claiming to be our ex-raid leader. He doesn’t even start small, saying he was simply in our guild – he takes the whole cake and proclaims himself raid leader!! So how did we handle this?

Well duh – we sent our Guild Leader, Amisaalia, the REAL Raid Leader, Chewey, and Ranedor – the man who strikes fear in the hearts of bad applicants everywhere, on to their vent to say ‘Hello’! And while I wish I had some funny story as to how that ended, unfortunately the second he saw the Three Musketeers join vent, he must have remembered he had plans to dislodge a foot from his mouth and promptly disconnected – ending his interview and any reputation he hoped to have with that guild.

Now, while we’re flattered someone thought we were good enough to lie about, this is an extreme example of why you should not lie about what you’ve done and can do in game. You most likely WILL be exposed. We’ve had applicants lie about about past raiding experience, only to have a quick look at their armory prove otherwise. We’ve had applicants that managed to get in on a previous guilds’ farm content to get an achievement before they were booted, and used that to say they had experience – that doesn’t work either, as it becomes painfully obvious they had no concept of how the fight worked (and in some cases, how their class worked) when we gave them a trial run. And it’s worth mentioning – again – that no one buys the ” I did these things on an unnamed alt on another server” bit – because, again, it will be very obvious you never did these things.

You can’t take back a lie like this. Once exposed, any credibility or chance you may have had just flew out the window. Is it worth it? If you are thinking of embellishing on an application, take a second and consider why you feel the need to do that: If you feel the need to lie and bolster your achievements, perhaps you arnt ready for the guild you are applying to. Look over your skills and experience, and find a guild that might be a smaller step up and would be a good start to start gaining what you feel is lacking.

Now please don’t misinterpret what I am saying – I am not advocating guild hopping (yet another thing that can be researched – no guild wants to take a fair weather member that takes gear and time from others and jumps ship), I’m just saying that no raider, no matter how advanced, started at the top, and you certainly won’t have much fun in a guild you know you are not ready for. The fun in raiding is learning and progressing with a group of people, not getting a piggyback ride to purples, and selecting a guild on your level will probably maximize your enjoyment of the game as well as your experience.

I have in the past and will continue to stress that lack of achievements or gear on a player is a minor thing to fix, for the most part. If an applicant demonstrates intelligence, a firm grasp of the game and his/her class mechanics, it’s a pretty good bet that they will quickly grasp a fight and can become a valuable raid member. Sometimes, honesty IS the best policy.

This is probably advice our dear Safetyman should have taken before he lied. I have no idea how he thought no one would look at his armory, or how he expected to come across as knowledgeable enough to lead raids on fights he’s never seen – it doesn’t matter. His credibility and any respect he may have on that server will most likely be severely tarnished-we all know how fast a good drama story spreads -and rebuilding your reputation is a lot harder than simply establishing a good one in the first place.

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Liar, Liar – Pants on Fire is a post from: Tales of a Priest

The Ready Check & You!

Derevka — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:58:00 +0000

The holidays have left me with little time, so I’m adding a new feature here at Tales: The Humor Hut. It just offers some random silliness on the occasional weekend, while leaving our week day posts for more practical things such as guides, strategies and theory discussions.

For the first installment, many of our readers seem to enjoy the rants of one of our guild officers, Ranedor, and his limited tolerance for stupidity as demonstrated by his responses to some of our more intellectually challenged applicants in our “Land of Denied Applications” or his commentary & play through on games in our Dark Nemesis: Let’s Play section. After numerous PuGs this holiday weekend, I thought I would share one of his very practical & educational posts from our guild forums.

The Ready Check boss encounter seems to be giving our guild the most problems, since many of our members lack common-fucking-sense; so I’ve decided to write up a strategy to help you all rise above your shortcomings and defeat this encounter. The encounter itself is pretty straightforward, which is possibly the very thing that’s screwing a lot of people up.

Benefits of clicking the correct button when the Ready Check encounter occurs:

Your reputation with The Raid Leader will increase by 100.
Your reputation with The Raid will increase by 100.
Chance to fuckup during boss encounter due to whining about not being fully buffed and prepared before the pull will decrease by 300%.
The Raid’s Pulling Haste rating will increase by 428.
Chance that Ranedor will laugh at you for being fucking stupid will decrease by 5%.

**Please notice there is no “Maybe” button, and that you are either (A) Ready, or (B) Not Ready.

When answering, the following guidelines should be adhered to as much as possible:

Click the No button if:

You do not have full health.
You do not have full mana.
You do not have every buff you’re supposed to have for the boss encounter.
You have not buffed every group/class you’ve been assigned to.
You do not have a complete understanding of the boss strategy.
You are not prepared, in whatever possible manner.

Click the Yes button if:

You have full health.
You have full mana.
You have every buff you’re supposed to have for the boss encounter.
You have buffed every group/class you’ve been assigned to.
You have a complete understanding of the boss strategy.
You are prepared, in every possible manner.

The nicest thing about this encounter is probably the fact that you can practice it over and over and over again, until you have absolutely mastered it.

Invite a random guildmate, convert the group to a raid, and ask them to endlessly Ready Check until you feel comfortable with your button-clicking abilities.

- Ranedor
Ret Paladin & Evil Guild Officer
www.godarknemesis.com

Ranedor can be in his found in his secret volcano lair, & on twitter: @ranedor86

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The Ready Check & You! is a post from: Tales of a Priest